Tag Archives: breakthrough

When I met with a customer exhibiting innovation capacities, she had this interesting perspective, I am quoting

“The power of an idea when run through our well oiled, efficient, process oriented delivery line, loses its potency and sometimes even its own relevance.How can we reduce the probability of this happening? Would it be possible to provide advisory services on developing an approach that will address this issue? Additionally can we develop convergence criteria for the ideas”

This brings forth several different points,

one – when people talk about innovation it is mostly incremental in nature and the metaphor of the assembly line is prevalent even in the cutting edge financial services companies (case in point) If the process of development is that efficient you don’t need humans anymore.

two – while the so called innovation facilitators (including yours truly) are great in coming out with numerous ideas within a short span of time, I am not clear about the convergence methods or idea selection itself.

That said I have had some success in designing people centric short listing (facilitation methods post ideation) but the fundamental problem still remains.

How does open innovation where ideas are even larger in number address this?

Convergence criteria as I see a trend today is mostly directed from business who seek specific ROI proof, worked elsewhere type of inputs based on which they EVALUATE to pick ideas than really build on a crazy idea that will possibly be the next BIG thing this is not incremental this is breakthrough.